Al-Qaeda tricked the West into the War on Terror in an effort to advance its own Islamist goals in the Middle East, the group’s former chemical weapons expert, who later allegedly became an MI6 spy, told RT’s Going Underground.

Aimen Dean, who joined Al-Qaeda in 1997, said the trick all began with a letter written by the former US think-tank Project for the New American Century, which was sent to former President Bill Clinton in 1998. It urged Clinton to invade Iraq and “make it a beacon of democracy and to establish American hegemony.”

That letter, Dean says, was signed by 18 people including Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and Jeb Bush, who would all “later become the architects of the Iraq war and the Bush administration.”

The next piece of the puzzle apparently lies in a line written by the same think-tank in one of its publications in 2000: “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”

Bin Laden’s deputy seized on that notion, according to Dean. “He said, ‘we should give them a Pearl Harbor…that’s exactly where we want them to be…[the US] must smash [Iraq] in order for us to build an Islamist structure.’”

“So that was their mentality, the provocation of America as a superpower to come and do their dirty work for them.”

And so, 9/11 happened almost exactly one year later, as a ‘new Pearl Harbor’, and the invasion of Iraq took place in 2003.